Data traffic from sensor, network, and/or storage subsystems can grow at a speed that can make it difficult to extract and/or analyze the data in a real-time manner. Regular expression pattern matching hardware, which can be a way for a user to express how a computer program should look for a specified pattern in data and then what the program is to do when each specified pattern match is found in the data, can be used to extract and/or analyze the data. For example, regular expression pattern matching hardware can be implemented in a finite state machine (FSM). Data can be fed into the FSM, where various operations can be performed on the data.
Some regular expression pattern matching hardware can perform data operations on one byte of data per cycle of the hardware. However, the speed of this approach is limited by a clock speed of a computer. Therefore, this approach cannot scale with a speed of incoming data traffic, which can transport multiple bytes per cycle. Other approaches have attempted to increase the amount of bytes that can processed by a single FSM. For example, multiple bytes can be input into the FSM at once. However, an improvement in performance resulting from multiple-byte processing can be outweighed by an increase in hardware costs and complexity, which can be associated with multiple-byte processing.